On the title track to Luluc’s second album—and their Sub Pop debut—Zoë Randell laments what she calls “the passerby life.” The song recounts several friends who have come and gone, some human and some not: a bearded guy named Mike Brown, an old man she knew as Mr. Finnegan, “a young dying baby lamb” that she fed by hand, “a tiny Christmas Island bird” with a broken wing. They’re lovely images and poignant remembrances, especially sung in Randell’s robustly ruminative voice and set to Steve Hassett’s gentle acoustic strums. As befits a duo that moved around the world to soft-start their career, the song dispels any romanticized notions of connection and memory: Everyone is a passerby in your life, and you’re merely a passerby in theirs.
And then Luluc ruin it. Randell ends the song with a blah couplet—“And as you go, know I love you so”—that brings the song to a rousing conclusion, completely undercutting the tough-minded verses. What begins as a world-wear reverie finishes as a Nicholas Sparks epilogue, as Luluc choose to state the obvious in the most obvious way possible. It’s not that those lines are wholly unnecessary, but that they carelessly cordon off the song’s emotions to deliver pat catharsis. Similarly, Passerby toggles awkwardly between the evocatively melancholy and the chintzily sentimental, rendering the carefully composed and performed music as little more than pretty.
This stumble will be all the more disappointing for anyone who heard the Brooklyn-via-Australia duo play on last year’s Way to Blue: the Songs of Nick Drake. It was an ill-conceived public tribute to a deeply private artist, yet Luluc’s versions of “Things Behind the Sun” and “Fly” were highlights that showcased both the dignified yearning of Drake’s lyrics and the easy chemistry between Randell and Hassett. They were something of an anomaly for those live performances, as at the time they had only one album, self-released back in 2008, to their name. On the strength of that tiny catalog and Randell’s big voice, Luluc signed to Sub Pop, where they join the Head & the Heart and Mirel Wagner on the folksier side of the roster.
Perhaps more crucially, Luluc gained the ear of the National’s Aaron Dessner, who agreed to produce Passerby at his studio in Brooklyn's Ditmas Park area. His contributions are low-key and mostly unobtrusive. To reinforce the theme of departure and travel, he emphasizes the spry rhythmic guitar strums on opener “Small Window” and peppers “Early Night” with low-key industrial noise. Only “Tangled Heart” builds to anything that might be considered a big moment, with its texturing of horns greeting the Randell’s romantic regrets. Still, even Dessner can’t nudge Luluc out of their comfort zone: Every song trudges by at the same midtempo, conjuring the same atmosphere of glum reminiscence with no relief or variation.
As rich as Randell’s voice may be, this collection portrays her as a sharply limited artist, with only one mode and a few interpretive tricks up her sleeve. Occasionally she goes purposefully flat like Nico, other times she rounds her vowels luxuriantly, but there’s no tension, no conflict, no story to connect those moments into something larger. The result is a strictly passerby album: one that is heard and then quickly forgotten.
